大学英语考试精读:第3册UNIT4

　　In big cities like New York, you can find homeless women with shopping bags wandering on the streets. They choose to live in an isolated, mistrustful world of their own. They are called lady hermits or just shopping-bag ladies.

Lady Hermits Who Are Down But Not Out

　　Every large city has its shifting population of vagrants. But in most cases these are men, usually with an unhealthy appetite for alcohol. Only New York, it seems, attracts this peculiar populace of lone and homeless women who live in an isolated, mistrustful world of their own.

　　Shopping-bag ladies do not drink. They do not huddle together for warmth and companionship like bums. They do not seem to like one another very much. Neither are they too keen on conventional people. Urban hermits, one sociologist has called them. They will send their days and nights in the same neighborhood for months on end, then disappear as inexplicably as they came. They know the hours when restaurants put their leftovers in the garbage cans where they search for food. And local residents, seeing the same bag lady on the same corner every day, will slip her some change as they pass.